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  Tkett also imagined using such a machine to find and rescue Peepoe.

  The beautiful dolphin medic—one of Makanee’s assistants—had been kidnapped shortly before Streaker departed. No one held out much hope of finding her, since the ocean was so vast and the two dolphin felons—Mopol and Zhaki—had an immensity to conceal her in. But that gloomy calculation assumed that searchers must travel by sled! A ship on the other hand—even a wreck that had lain on an ocean-floor garbage dump for half a million years—could cover a lot more territory and listen with big underwater sonaphones, combing for telltale sounds from Peepoe and her abductors. It might even be possible to sift the waters for Earthling DNA traces. Tkett had heard of such techniques available for a high price on Galactic markets. Who knew what wonders the fabled Buyur took for granted on their elegant starcraft?

  Unfortunately, the trail kept going hot and cold. Sometimes he picked up murmurs that seemed incredibly close—channeled by watery layers that focused sound. Other times they vanished altogether.

  Frustrated, Tkett was willing to try anything. So when Chissis started getting agitated, squealing in Primal that a great beast prowled to the southwest, he willingly turned the sled in the direction she indicated.

  And soon he was rewarded. Indicators began flashing on the control panel, and down his neural-link cable, connecting the sled to an implanted socket behind his left eye. In addition to a surge of noise, mass displacement anomalies suggested something of immense size was moving ponderously just ahead, and perhaps a hundred meters down.

  “I guess we better go find out what it is,” he told his passenger, who clicked her agreement.

  # go chase go chase go chase ORCAS! #

  She let out squawls of laughter at her own cleverness. But minutes later, as they plunged deeper into the sea—both listening and peering down the shaft of the sled’s probing headlights—Chissis ceased chuckling and became silent as a tomb.

  Great Dreamers! Tkett stared in awe and surprise at the object before them. It was unlike any starship he had ever seen before. Sleek metallic sides seemed to go on and on forever as the titanic machine trudged onward across the sea floor, churning up mud with thousands of shimmering, crystalline legs!

  As if sensing their arrival, a mammoth hatch began irising open—in benign welcome, he hoped.

  No resurrected starship. Tkett began to suspect he had come upon something entirely different.

  PEEPOE

  Her rib cage heaved.

  Peepoe’s lungs filled with a throbbing ache as she forced herself to dive ever deeper, much lower than would have been wise, even if she weren’t fatigued to the very edge of consciousness.

  The sea at this depth was black. Her eyes made out nothing. But that was not the important sense, underwater. Sonar clicks, emitted from her brow, grew more rapid as she scanned ahead, using her sensitive jaw as an antenna to sift the reflections.

  It’s big…she thought when the first signs returned.

  Echo outlines began coalescing, and she shivered.

  It doesn’t sound like metal. The shape…seems less artificial than something—

  A thrill of terror coursed her spine as she realized that the thing ahead had outlines resembling a gigantic living creature! A huge mass of fins and trailing tentacles, resembling some monster from the stories dolphin children would tell each other at night, secure in their rookeries near one of Earth’s great port cities. What lay ahead of Peepoe, swimming along well above the canyon floor, seemed bigger and more intimidating than the giant squid who fought Physeter sperm whales, mightiest of all the cetaceans.

  And yet, Peepoe kept arching her back, pushing hard with her flukes, straining ever downward. Curiosity compelled her. Anyway, she was closer to the creature than the sea surface, where Zhaki and Mopol waited.

  I might as well find out what it is.

  Curiosity was just about all she had left to live for.

  When several tentacles began reaching for her, the only remaining question in her mind was about death.

  I wonder who I’ll meet on the other side.

  MAKANEE

  The dolphins in the pod—her patients—all woke about the same time from their afternoon siesta, screaming.

  Makanee and her nurses joined Brookida, who had been on watch, swimming rapid circles around the frightened reverts, preventing any of them from charging in panic across the wide sea. Slowly, they all calmed down from a shared nightmare.

  It was a common enough experience back on Earth, when unconscious sonar clicks from two or more sleeping dolphins would sometimes overlap and interfere, creating false echoes. The ghost of something terrifying. That most cetaceans sleep just one brain hemisphere at a time did not help. In a way, that seemed only to make the dissonance more eerie, and the fallacious sound-images more credibly scary.

  Most of the patients were inarticulate, emitting only a jabber of terrified Primal squeals. But there were a dozen or so borderline cases who might even recover their full faculties someday. One of these moaned nervously about Tkett and a city of spells.

  Another one chittered nervously, repeating over and over, the name of Peepoe.

  TKETT

  Well, at least the machine has air inside, he thought. We can survive here, and learn more.

  In fact, the huge underwater edifice—bigger than all but the largest starships—seemed rather accommodating, pulling back metal walls as the little sled entered a spacious airlock. The floor sank in order to provide a pool for Tkett and Chissis to debark from their tight cockpits and swim around. It felt good to get out of the cramped confines, even though Tkett knew that coming inside might be a mistake.

  Makanee’s orders had been to do an inspection from the outside, then hurry home. But that was when they expected to find one of the rusty little spacecraft that Streaker’s engineers had resurrected from some sea floor dross-pile. As soon as Tkett saw this huge cylindrical thing, churning along the sea bottom on a myriad caterpillar legs that gleamed like crystal stalks, he knew that nothing on Jijo could stand in the way of his going aboard.

  Another wall folded aside, revealing a smooth channel that stretched ahead—water below and air above—beckoning the two dolphins down a hallway that shimmered as it continued transforming before their eyes. Each panel changed color with the glimmering luminescence of octopus skin, seeming to convey meaning in each transient, flickering shade. Chissis thrashed her tail nervously as objects kept slipping through seams in the walls. Sometimes these featured a camera lens at the end of an articulated arm, peering at them as they swam past.

  Not even the Buyur could afford to throw away something as wonderful as this, Tkett thought, relishing a fantasy of taking this technology home to Earth. At the same time, the mechanical implements of his tool harness quivered, responding to nervous twitches that his brain sent down the neural tap. He had no weapons that would avail in the slightest if the owners of this place proved to be hostile.

  The corridor spilled at last into a wide chamber with walls and ceiling that were so corrugated he could not estimate its true volume. Countless bulges and spires protruded inward, half of them submerged, and the rest hanging in midair. All were bridged by cables and webbing that glistened like spiderwebs lined with dew. Many of the branches carried shining spheres or cubes or dodecahedrons that dangled like geometric fruit, ranging from half a meter across to twice the length of a bottlenose dolphin.

  Chissis let out a squawl, colored with fear and awe.

  # coral that bites! coral bites bites!

  # See the critters, stabbed by coral! #

  When he saw what she meant, Tkett gasped. The hanging “fruits” were mostly transparent. They contained things that moved…creatures who writhed or hopped or ran in place, churning their arms and legs within the confines of their narrow compartments.

  Adaptive optics in his right eye whirred, magnifying and zooming toward one of the crystal-walled containers. Meanwhile, his brow cast forth a stream of nervous son
ar clicks—useless in the air—as if trying to penetrate this mystery with yet another sense.

  I don’t believe it!

  He recognized the shaggy creature within a transparent cage.

  Ifni! It’s a hoon. A miniature hoon!

  Scanning quickly, he found individuals of other species…four-legged urs with their long necks whipping nervously, like muscular snakes…minuscule traeki that resembled their Jophur cousins, looking like tapered stacks of doughnuts, piled high…and tiny versions of wheeled g’Keks, spinning their hubs madly, as if they were actually going somewhere. In fact, every member of the Commons of Six Races of Jijo—fugitive clans that had settled this world illegally during the last two thousand years—could be seen here, represented in lilliputian form.

  Tkett’s spine shuddered when he made out several cells containing slim bipedal forms. Bantamweight human beings, whose race had struggled against lonely ignorance on old Terra for so many centuries, nearly destroying the world before they finally matured enough to lead the way toward the true sapiency for the rest of Earthclan. Before Tkett’s astonished eye, these members of the patron race were now reduced to leaping and cavorting within the confines of dangling crystal spheres.

  PEEPOE

  Death would not be so mundane…nor hurt in such familiar ways. When she began regaining consciousness, there was never any doubt which world this was. The old cosmos of life and pain.

  Peepoe remembered the sea monster, an undulating behemoth of fins, tendrils, and phosphorescent scales, more than a kilometer long and nearly as wide, flapping wings like a manta ray as it glided well above the seafloor. When it reached up for her, she never thought of fleeing toward the surface, where mere enslavement waited. Peepoe was too exhausted by that point, and too transfixed by the images—both sonic and luminous—of a true leviathan.

  The tentacle was gentler than expected, in grabbing her unresisting body and drawing it toward a widening beak-like maw. As she was pulled between a pair of jagged-edged jaws, Peepoe had let blackness finally claim her, moments before the end. The last thought to pass through her head was a Trinary haiku.

  * Arrogance is answered

  * When each of us is reclaimed.

  * Rejoin the food chain!

  Only there turned out to be more to her life, after all. Expecting to become pulped food for huge intestines, she wakened instead, surprised to find herself in another world.

  A blurry world, at first. She lay in a small pool, that much was evident. But it took moments to restore focus. Meanwhile, out of the pattern of her bemused sonar clickings, a reflection seemed to mold itself, unbidden, surrounding Peepoe with Trinary philosophy.

  * In the turning of life’s cycloid,

  * Pulled by sun and moon insistence,

  * Once a springtime storm may toss you,

  * Over reefs that have no channel,

  * Into some lagoon untraveled,

  * Where strange fishes, spiny-poisoned,

  * Taunt you, forlorn, isolated…

  It wasn’t an auspicious thought-poem, and Peepoe cut it off sharply, lest such stark sonic imagery trigger panic. The Trinary fog clung hard, though. It dissipated only with fierce effort, leaving a sense of dire warning in its wake.

  Rising to the surface, Peepoe lifted her head and inspected the pool, lined by a riot of dense vegetation. Dense jungle stretched on all sides, brushing the rough-textured ceiling and cutting off small inhabitants, from flying insectoids to clambering things that peered at her shyly from behind sheltering leaves and shadows.

  A habitat, she realized. Things lived here, competed, preyed on each other, died, and were recycled in a familiar ongoing synergy. The largest starships often contained ecological life-support systems, replenishing both food and oxygen supplies in the natural way.

  But this is no starship. It can’t be. The huge shape I saw could never fly. It was a sea beast, meant for the underwater world. It must have been alive!

  Well, was there any reason why a gigantic animal could not keep an ecology going inside itself, like the bacterial cultures that helped Peepoe digest her own food?

  So now what? Am I supposed to take part in all of this somehow? Or have I just begun a strange process of being digested?

  She set off with a decisive push of her flukes. A dolphin without tools wasn’t very agile in an environment like this. Her monkey-boy cousins—humans and chimps—would do better. But Peepoe was determined to explore while her strength lasted.

  A channel led out of the little pool. Maybe something more interesting lay around the next bend.

  TKETT

  One of the spiky branches started moving, bending and articulating as it bent lower toward the watery surface where he and Chissis waited. At its tip, one of the crystal “fruits” contained a quadrupedal being—an us whose long neck twisted as she peered about with glittering black eyes.

  Tkett knew just a few things about this species. For example, they hated water in its open liquid form. Also the females were normally as massive as a full-grown human, yet this one appeared to be as small as a diminutive urrish male, less than twenty centimeters from nose to tail. Back in the Civilization of Five Galaxies, urs were known as great engineers. Humans didn’t care for their smell (the feeling was mutual), but interactions between the two starfaring clans had been cordial. Urs weren’t among the persecutors of Earthclan.

  Tkett had no idea why an offshoot group of urs came to this world, centuries ago, establishing a secret and illegal colony on a world that had been declared off-limits by the Migration Institute. As one of the Six Races, they now galloped across Jijo’s prairies, tending herds and working metals at forges that used heat from fresh volcanic lava pools. To find one here, under the sea, left him boggled and perplexed.

  The creature seemed unaware of the dolphins who watched from nearby. From certain internal reflections, Tkett guessed that the glassy confines of the enclosure were transparent only in one direction. Flickering scenes could be made out, playing across the opposite internal walls. He glimpsed hilly countryside covered with swaying grass. The little urs galloped along, as if unencumbered and unenclosed.

  The sphere dropped closer, and Tkett saw that it was choked with innumerable microscopic threads that crisscrossed the little chamber. Many of these terminated at the body of the urs, especially the bottoms of her flashing hooves.

  Resistance simulators! Tkett recognized the principle, though he had never seen such a magnificent implementation. Back on Earth, humans and chimps would sometimes put on full bodysuits and VR helmets before entering chambers where a million needles made up the floor, each one computer controlled. As the user walked along a fictitious landscape, depicted visually in goggles he wore, the needles would rise and fall, simulating the same rough terrain underfoot. Each of these small crystal containers apparently operated in the same way, but with vastly greater texture and sophistication. So many tendrils pushing, stroking or stimulating each patch of skin, could feign wind blowing through urrish fur, or simulate the rough sensation of holding a tool…perhaps even the delightful rub and tickle of mating.

  Other stalks descended toward Tkett and Chissis, holding many more virtual-reality fruits, each one containing a single individual. All of Jijo’s sapient races were present, though much reduced in stature. Chissis seemed especially agitated to see small humans that ran about, or rested, or bent in apparent concentration over indiscernible tasks. None seemed aware of being observed.

  It all felt horribly creepy, yet the subjects did not give an impression of lethargy or unhappiness. They seemed vigorous, active, interested in whatever engaged them. Perhaps they did not even know the truth about their peculiar existence.

  Chissis snorted her uneasiness, and Tkett agreed. Something felt weird about the way these microenvironments were being paraded before the two of them, as if the mind—or minds—controlling the whole vast apparatus had some point it was trying to make, or some desire to communicate.

  Is the aim t
o impress us?

  He wondered about that, then abruptly realized what it must be about.

  …all of Jijo’s sapient races were present…

  In fact, that was no longer true. Another species of thinking beings now dwelled on this world, the newest one officially sanctioned by the Civilization of Five Galaxies.

  Neo-dolphins.

  Oh, certainly the reverts like poor Chissis were only partly sapient anymore. And Tkett had no illusions about what Dr. Makanee thought of his own mental state. Nevertheless, as stalk after stalk bent to present its fruit before the two dolphins, showing off the miniature beings within—all of them busy and apparently happy with their existence—he began to feel as if he was being wooed.

  “Ifni’s boss…” he murmured aloud, amazed at what the great machine appeared to be offering. “It wants us to become part of all this!”

  PEEPOE

  A village of small grass huts surrounded the next pool she entered.

  Small didn’t half describe it. The creatures who emerged to swarm around the shore stared at her with wide eyes, set in skulls less than a third of normal size.

  They were humans and hoons, mostly…along with a few traeki and a couple of glavers…all races whose full-sized cousins lived just a few hundred kilometers away, on a stretch of Jijo’s western continent called The Slope.

  As astonishing as she found these lilliputians, they stared in even greater awe at her. I’m like a whale to them, she realized, noting with some worry that many of them brandished spears or other weapons.

  She heard a chatter of worried conversation as they pointed at her long gray bulk. That meant their brains were large enough for speech. Peepoe noted that the creatures’ heads were out of proportion to their bodies, making the humans appear rather childlike…until you saw the men’s hairy, scarred torsos, or the women’s breasts, pendulous with milk for hungry babies. Their rapid jabber grew more agitated by the moment.